Major funding for backstory is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment

for the Humanities, the University of Virginia, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation,

and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundation.

From Virginia Humanities, this is backstory.

Welcome to backstory, the show that explains the history behind today's headlines.

I'm Joanne Freeman.

And I'm Brian Balla.

If you're new to the podcast, we're all historians, and each week we explore the history of one topic that's been in the news.

On today's show, we're looking at a topic that can pretty much make or break a news story, photography.

Now, in the 21st century, we often use photographs as a kind of shorthand for the truth,

and certainly anybody who has spent any time on the internet has probably heard the immortal phrase,

picks where it didn't happen.

But that certainly wasn't always the case.

In the 19th century, as photography became widespread, Americans had to figure out what it was a photograph showed them.

Could a photograph show a larger truth about human nature?

Could they even be trusted to show any kind of truth at all?

So today on the show, we're going to look at stories of Americans working to understand what photographs showed them.

We'll follow the career of one of the 19th century's most famous spirit photographers,

plus we'll look at how Midwestern towns salt themselves through some truly spectacular photographs of produce.

But first, many historians have a document, a letter or a diary, or even an image that changes the way they see their own research.

For Martha Sandwise, the document she keeps coming back to,

are a small collection of daguerreotypes taken in the 1840s.

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